Kansas City plans to reopen its film office

Members of Kansas City's film community hope to reel some business after the city's long-dormant film office reopens.

The city budget, which takes effect May 1, provides $50,000 in tourism tax dollars for the film office, a figure that'll be matched by the Convention and Visitors Association. The funds will pay for a full-time director, who will lead efforts to attract movies, commercials, reality TV and more to Kansas City, the Kansas City Star reported. It is unclear how quickly the office will open.

Budget problems prompted the city to stop funding the film office in 2002, and it closed about two years later after depleting partial funding from the Convention and Visitors Association. Volunteers tried to keep film efforts going but had difficulty coordinating with those interested in working in the city.

"We desperately need somebody to be doing this job," said Heather Laird, a casting director who is chairwoman of the volunteer Greater Kansas City Film Commission. She said the lack of a film office cost the city a chance to attract the NBC show "America's Got Talent" and a $12 million feature film "The Good Lie," which is about Lost Boys of Sudan who resettled in Kansas City — it was filmed in Atlanta.

Laird said a full-time film officer would have known about "The Good Lie" earlier and could have lured it to Kansas City.

Patti Broyles Harper said that while serving as the city's full-time film office director from 1994 to 2002, she promoted the Kansas City region to the Los Angeles and New York film industries. The office helped production companies on location in the Kansas City area and brought in more than $80 million to the economy during that period, including HBO's "Truman," Robert Altman's "Kansas City" and Ang Lee's "Ride With the Devil."

Russ Hadley, a former chairman of the film commission, said his cellphone was the film office in the years since the office shut down. When people called wanting information about filming in Kansas City, he helped as much as he could while running his own production company.

"I did my best to steer them in the right direction, but I wasn't able to follow up because I was busy," he said.

Reopening the film office gained traction when the Mayor's Task Force on the Arts issued a report in December noting that the arts, including film and media production, employ tens of thousands of workers and pump millions of dollars into the local economy.